How the UK government can follow Obama's open source revolution

Barack Obama's new open source policy has seen the White House contributing to the open source community

The Obama White House is releasing custom open source code that it developed itself back to the Drupal community.

The White House said that by releasing some of its code it will get the benefit of more people reviewing and improving it.

“This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify,” said Dave Cole, senior adviser to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President.

“We're excited to see how developers across the world put our work to good use in their own applications.”

The Obama administration is releasing a module called Context HTTP Headers, which allows site builders to add new metadata to the content they serve. A second module addresses scalability by allowing integration with the Akamai Content Delivery Network.

GovDelivery is another module that enables the sending of more dynamic emails tailored to users' preferences, while Node Embed makes sure all video and pictures on the White House site have the appropriate metadata to make them readable by screen reading software.

How the UK can follow Obama’s example

Meanwhile, in the UK, the government last year pledged to prioritise open source software over propriety software for all of its IT projects, in an effort to save money.

Research firm Gartner explained that until recently, the UK government had maintained a conservative attitude toward open source, but said that it has begun operating a policy calling for “positive actions toward the adoption of open source”.

The policy stresses the importance of applying best value-for-money criteria, which considers total cost of ownership as well as aspects such as scalability and security. It advocates selecting open-source products where there is "no significant overall cost difference" owing to its greater inherent flexibility.

Gartner advises that UK government CIOs must assess how open source technology will impact their planned investments for the next two years, and how to go about forcing an immediate reduction in costs.

Purchasers should start working toward the introduction of a "buy-once" clause, which would ensure that solutions acquired by one department can be transferred at no or nominal cost across government organisations.

“The UK policy on the use of open source, open standards and the reuse of government-purchased software has the potential to have a long-lasting impact on cost containment and change the relationships with government suppliers,” said Andrea DiMaio, government analyst at Gartner.

“However, it requires careful implementation and a better balance between the desire for openness and risk management.”

In order to procure cheaper solutions and more open source, IT staff need to increase their skills in areas such as licensing and support issues, according to Gartner. Government departments must share information about their respective evaluation of complete or partial open-source proposals, and regularly assess product maturity.

“The UK government would then see the importance of partnering with industry in making this policy work,” concluded DiMaio.